One thing very slowly learnt by most human beings is, that they are of no earthly consequence beyond a very small circle indeed, and that really nobody is thinking or talking about them.  Almost every commonplace man and woman in this world has a vague, but deeply-rooted belief that they are quite different from anybody else, and of course quite superior to everybody else.  It may be in only one respect they fancy they are this, but that one respect is quite sufficient.  I believe, that, if a grocer or silk-mercer in a little town has a hundred customers, each separate customer lives on under the impression that the grocer or the silk-mercer is prepared to give to him or her certain advantages in buying and selling which will not be accorded to the other ninety-nine customers.  “Say it is for Mrs. Brown,” is Mrs. Brown’s direction to her servant, when sending for some sugar; “say it is for Mrs. Brown, and he will give it a little better.”  The grocer, keenly alive to the weaknesses of his fellow-creatures, encourages this notion.  “This tea,” he says, “would be four-and-sixpence a pound to any one else, but to you it is only four-and-threepence.”  Judging from my own observation, I should say that retail dealers trade a good deal upon this singular fact in the constitution of the human mind, that it is inexpressibly bitter to most people to believe that they stand on the ordinary level of humanity,—­that, in the main, they are just like their neighbors.  Mrs. Brown would be filled with unutterable wrath, if it were represented to her that the grocer treats her precisely as he does Mrs. Smith, who lives on one side of her, and Mrs. Snooks, who lives on the other.  She would be still more angry, if you asked her what earthly reason there is why she should in any way be distinguished beyond Mrs. Snooks and Mrs. Smith.  She takes for granted she is quite different from them, quite superior to them.  Human beings do not like to be classed,—­at least, with the class to which in fact they belong.  To be classed at all is painful to an average mortal, who firmly believes that there never was such a being in this world.  I remember one of the cleverest friends I have—­one who assuredly cannot be classed intellectually, except in a very small and elevated class—­telling me how mortified he was, when a very clever boy of sixteen, at being classed at all.  He had told a literary lady that he admired Tennyson.  “Yes,” said the lady, “I am not surprised at that:  there is a class of young men who like Tennyson at your age.”  It went like a dart to my friend’s heart. Class of young men, indeed!  Was it for this that I outstripped all competitors at school, that I have been fancying myself a unique phenomenon in Nature, different at least from every other being that lives, that I should be spoken of as one of a class of young men?  Now in my friend’s half-playful reminiscence I see the exemplification of a great fact in human nature.